As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.

We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.

But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don’t know
We don’t know.

-Donald Rumsfeld

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The aide said that guys like me [Suskind] were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

-Unknown but commonly attributed to Karl Rove

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My reasoning for why these matter:

The Rumsfeld quote lives on with me due to its sheer absurdity and his explanation behind the impetus for the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, that the inability to predict 9/11 was a “failure of imagination.” Yet it seems the “imaginations” in charge continue to become more and more narrow and unable to imagine anything outside of a set of prescribed ideas. I actually hate this quote because it reveals the kind of absurdist thinking behind the beginnings of the fascist machinations we live under today.

The Rove quote lives on with me because as much as I hate his guts, he was abso-fucking-lutely right and the Trump administration has practically weaponized this against the “reality based community” which spends its time on journalism and court cases that take years while a thousand new crimes have been committed in the meantime, all of which will take further years of journalism and court cases to resolve. A death by a thousand cuts by moving so fast that the rest of us are “left to just study what [they] do.”

Sorry my quotes are kind of downers and not ones you actually want to live by. However, we’re living through dark times and I think understanding the mindsets of those would cage and kill us is pretty important.